


Metal Heart

by ekaterin



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, Frank Castle has feelings, Frank Castle is his own warning, Frank Castle's love language is surveillance, Karen Page will fuck you up, Kidnapping, THIS SHIP IS AN EMOTIONAL HELLSCAPE, Torture, and a filthy mouth, punishing, random criminals are random, the usual
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2018-10-21 10:32:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10683492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ekaterin/pseuds/ekaterin
Summary: Who the fuck uses manacles, anyway? Frank doesn't even know where he would go to buy (or steal) them, and that's saying something.(Remember when the Irish tried to use Max the Dog to make Frank talk? Substitute Karen for Max here; it does not go well for anyone.)





	1. you're not hiding

**Author's Note:**

> I know it's short, but I wanted to get it out there as an incentive to write the rest sooner rather than later. This is just setting the scene.  
> The whole story bloomed in my mind whilst listening to this:  
> https://8tracks.com/infinidensity-tumblr/love-and-other-natural-disasters  
> Enjoy, comment, whatever! Let's all board this ship to wreck it.

Consciousness broke over him like a storm at sea, every part of his body and mind urgently demanding attention-- _an almost unrecognizable face, still and bloody on the grass_ ; a burning in his shoulders and thighs, a dull throb in each forefinger; _the weight of a gun in his right hand and a knife in his left, squaring his shoulders with a feeling of purpose and grim satisfaction_ ; the taste of blood in his mouth; _a whirling blur of red and black in a dim hallway_ ; a grinding pain at the back of his his head; _a flash of gold and white and a desperate voice calling his name out of the dark_ ; something cold and hard that clanked biting into his wrists and ankles--and he groaned, opening his eyes. He already knew that there were four other men in the room, two at the door behind him and two in front, milling between ten and two, guns slung lazily from their straps. He hated P-90s, they looked like some scifi bullshit and they felt all wrong in his hands, too small and smooth for their weight. And these punks weren't even holding them ready, like they had nothing to fear from him. Mistake. 

They'd moved him while he was out; he was manacled (Seriously? Who the fuck uses manacles, anyway? Frank doesn't even know where he would go to buy--or steal--them, and that's saying something) to a chair bolted to the floor, with a length of chain wrapped loosely around his neck and attached to something above him in the dark recesses of the ceiling. The whole thing was so cliché, so theatrical, so goddamn _familiar_ that he almost expected there to be a meathook and pulley. Well. He'd spent enough time being interrogated by these assholes, whoever they were, in this dank warehouse, wherever it was, to know that the chain collaring him like a rabid dog could be tightened at a word from the Boss, the man with the scarily soft voice. At least he wasn't suspended anymore; that had been hell on his arms and back. He smothered a chuckle at the thought of giving every last one of these motherfuckers and all their scumbag friends a K-BAR in the eye, and spat blood--it was crusted over half his face, in his mouth and nose--onto the floor.

"Who do I have to kill in here to get a cup of coffee?" he asked the cavernous space around him, voice rasping through his raw throat. The guards shifted around, looking at one another before laughing weakly. Good, they were still nervous. He hauled his head the rest of the way up and bared his bloody teeth in a smile that was more animal challenge than recognizably human expression. Hell, he was the goddamn Punisher, he _was_ more animal than human most days. His cologne was cordite and blood and cheap soap that never completely washed away the grime from under his fingernails, with the occasional note of dog; he bet that Red could identify him from blocks away. It was the smell of a living dead man, dead twice over and still not finished with this mission, this shitstorm of a life, this purgatorial forlorn-hope crusade in the armpit colony that is Hell's Kitchen. Thinking of the tenacious, vivid spark of life he had rejected would only make him weak, distracted. The mission was his purpose, and no one else who deserved to live should die just for knowing him.

That's when the bastards dragged her in, disturbingly limp, gold hair matted with blood at the temple. _God, Karen, NO._ His roar of rage and hate bounced off the metal walls, deafening and useless.


	2. a sad, sad zoo

Frank wanted to kill them for touching her. His snarl was still bouncing back to him in his goddamn immovable chair and chains as he thrashed, putting up more of a fight than he had when they'd broken his index fingers. He panted, breathing out his boiling anger, taking stock of Karen where she had been dumped on the cold floor like trash, and memorizing the faces of the ones whose hands had left bruises on her pale skin. A bullet or a blade to the belly for them, not the clean death of a headshot or a slit throat, if he had the time on his way out of this place. He didn't doubt for a second that he (they) would get out, it was just a matter of when and how much pain and death stood between them and the door.

She was wearing pajamas that he would have found hilarious in another situation, in another life--actual old man pajamas, plaid in something soft and worn and warm-looking, flannel maybe, dark blue and grey--but not now, not with half the buttons torn from the top and one knee ripped to show it skinned and bleeding. Her feet were bare, one swelling, and her hands (where they weren't obscured by the messy mass of hair tumbled over them and obscuring her face) were raw at the knuckles and ziptied together. He had no doubt her face was bruised as well. He wondered about her gun, the combat prize .380 he had felt such satisfaction at seeing in her hands, felt such comfort in knowing she kept on her most of the time. (She may not have seen him for weeks, but that didn't mean he hadn't seen _her_. Watched her. Maybe shadowed her once or twice on her way home when she went to that disgusting dive bar or investigated the shadier side of the Kitchen late at night, alone, like she had a fucking death wish. Not like a stalker, just... and this was not the time to have this argument with himself. Again.) Frank's lips twisted, making the dried blood under his nose itch; at least she had fought them when they came for her in the dark, and he hoped she had given as good as she got before the blow to the temple that was still oozing sluggishly had taken her down. He was proud of her, even though he had no right to be.  
Jesus, he wanted to touch her, just to feel her chest rise and fall with her breath, just to feel her pulse beating _alivealivealive_ beneath her skin. Smooth the hair back from the wound on her head. Why did these shitbricks want her? Who had she pissed off lately? He mentally ran down the list of who she was looking into and why--he knew his intel wasn't complete, but she was a journalist these days, not a damned spy, so he thought he had the picture pretty clear--but he was a little hampered by not knowing any more about these particular lowlifes than the name of their boss, Sarkov, and that they _really_ wanted to know where a shipment of "special" heroin had gone a few days back. They seemed to assume that when he had "inherited" Schoonover's guns (and how did they know that? Only he and Karen knew what had happened in that cabin, and even Karen only knew half the story), the Punisher did the same with the drugs he had run as the Blacksmith. Had even waved a packet with a red squiggly stamp on it in his face like they expected it to mean something to him, to frighten him. That was when they broke his trigger fingers, and fuck all if he could help twitching them right now. He hadn't even known he had that tick until it hurt.

Karen shifted in her uneasy, painful drift back toward consciousness, moaning and trying to touch her head with her hands. He couldn't settle her himself, so he growled at the guards to turn her over and get her hair out of her face before she drowned in her own sick, and a basin would be nice unless they _liked_ the smell of vomit. They reluctantly did as he asked-slash-ordered, and had almost instant cause to be glad: Karen came awake mumbling _O God I drank the eel again_ and managed to lever herself up onto her bound hands before being violently ill into the rusted paint can one of the younger guards had found. Frank wished it had been all over his boots, but was pretty sure that Karen would have been made to pay for it. To his surprise, the same young man gave her water when she asked him, her voice hoarse and bewildered; her instincts were good: she was wary but not fearful in front of these strange men, polite but not servile. When her gaze wandered over to him--not until the guards were outside of some personal bubble by which she defined threat--she smiled, looking exhausted but genuinely glad, and said,

"Frank! I _missed_ you. And you wouldn't believe the headache I have right now." And as thought that explained everything, she scooted over to his chair, leaned her head against his thigh, and fell back to sleep.

Fucking Christ, Frank hated concussions, apparently almost as much in other people as in himself. But he could feel her breathing against the rough denim of his jeans, regular and deep, and that was better than anything he could have reasonably hoped for in this situation. Taking a moment just to look at her, alive and close, Frank let his eyes flicker back and forth compulsively between her and the single point of egress across the room with its dawdling perimeter guards, the motion disguised as a restless cracking of his neck. He knew his mind was trying to offer him (them) safety by calculating escape: he glanced up, away from her, looking instead at everyone and everything else, checking where and what and how many, and he knew it was futile, damn it, he _knew_ that, but he also didn't know how to stop, or what to do instead. So he did the thing he was second-best at, the other thing that every Marine knows how to do: he waited. 

"I missed you, too, Karen," he whispered down to her, "I missed you, too."


	3. All the Bad Dreaming

One of the things Karen hates most about really _being a big girl_ —one who can take care of herself (mostly), and handle whatever life in the Kitchen throws at her and come right back with a knee to the groin or a headline, whichever works best—is the way her body reacts sometimes without her control; Ellison is constantly on her back about what he calls (in his snarkiest, most pedantic voice) “making conclusions in advance of provable OR PRINTABLE, because let’s face it that’s what matters, information,” but this time her "gut feeling" is a lot more like incipient cardiac arrest than faulty reasoning. It's as though her heart is racing before her, leaving her mind behind and unable to discern friends from enemies fast enough to catch up. (And it doesn't help that the definition of “friend” has changed so drastically in the last few months, stretched and frayed almost beyond recognition.)

So it is with a feeling of more of resignation than fear that Karen wakes all at once, already breathing hard through an open mouth, hands already shaking, blood already rushing cold through her body, ears and eyes refusing to tell her anything that makes any sense. No—it isn't her blood that's cold, it's the air in her room—and O, god, it isn't her room at all, it is _a_ room, big and dark and weirdly quiet compared to the pounding in her ears, pulse beating fast in her throat. Her belly is knotted from the false fuel of adrenaline, her mouth tastes like death, and she hurts in places that make no sense. With a formless gasp she tries to turn back, clutching at the warmth of her pillow, but it isn't her pillow because this isn't her room, and she flings herself blindly away from… whatever the not-her-bed thing is, landing on her face and it hurts like a bitch and her hands, fuckfuckfuck, her _bound_ hands, zipped together and aching, are crushed beneath her. She lies still a moment, hair sticking to her open lips, burning cheek pressed against the floor, and tries to breathe. She counts her inhales, but they stutter and die in her throat before any air reaches her lungs, and she loses track. Her pajamas—what the hell?!?—are torn open at one knee and dragged down from one shoulder. She feels ridiculous and frustrated and angry, and it all feeds the panic bubbling in her chest, heaving breath after heaving breath, none of them seeming to contain any oxygen at all. The pounding in her head is getting louder, a hoarse low rumbling that goes on and on and—

“—come on, Page, come on, COME ON, PAGE, SIT UP! I know you can hear me, Page, I KNOW YOU CAN, so sit up and breathe with me, alright? IN, one! two! three! OUT, one! two! three! Come on, Page! DO IT! Fuck you, asshole, she’s gonna pass out, you wanna hit me, you hit me, but—“ a grunt, followed by a thick, wet cough, “—if she can hear me she can stay conscious, you want us both conscious, right? Karen? Karen! Can you hear me? God damn it, Karen, you gotta listen, you HAVE to breathe, slow, in, one….”

And it goes on like that for a while, the voice talking her down. She knows somewhere in the still-functioning recesses of her mind that it ought to be funny that this particular voice could help her calm herself (in a… warehouse? storage facility? with bound hands, ripped clothes, mysterious pains, and no memory of anything after work, which could have been three hours or three days ago) and she begins to laugh, a small manic giggle, but it breaks the straining pattern of the anxiety attack and suddenly she is lightheaded with air and relief.

“That’s right, Karen, shhh, right, you got it now. Ok. Shhh, ok, ok. You with me?”

Karen groans. Her head is killing her. A line from an old movie drifts across her mind and out of her mouth before she has time to process it; talking around a mouthful of hair feels very strange.  
“Alright, tough guy,” more wheezing giggles that makes her ribs ache, “let’s see you try something _really_ tough,“ she mumbles to herself, “like putting on your pants.”

A bark of surprised laughter is her reward, and she turns her face toward it as she levers herself painfully up off the concrete floor, the sudden resumption of blood flow to her hands and face stinging like a slap. She turns, wincing, and there, of course, of fucking course, is Frank, in his usual (boots, dark jeans, the remains of a black hoodie over a blood-spattered undershirt), with lacerations and contusions everywhere she can see skin and probably everywhere she can’t, hair stuck to his forehead with sweat, smirking at her with half his mouth and eyes glinting dark and serious.

He lets the smile drop to ask her, with that earnestness that always makes her feel like her skin is too small, “You ok?”

“Jesus, Frank. Yes? No? I don’t know yet. Are you?” Both keep their voices low. Karen suddenly feels like she can say more to Frank with a whisper, or he to her with the tension around his eyes and mouth, than she could get out of Matt--or even Foggy, now that he's cut his hair and gone corporate--in all the time she knew him.

“That’s fair. Yeah, uh. I've been here about a day and a half. Nothing too bad yet. I don't know who they are," he tilts his head at the men lurking at the periphery of the room, "but they want something Schoonover had, and they think I have it or know who does. Heroin, but there's something special about it. Beyond, you know, where it came from and... how." He trails off, gets lost in the middle distance somewhere for a minute, probably thinking of how ( _in whom_ ) and the carnage that followed everyone who knew about it. "Something someone put in or took out that makes it much more valuable. And dangerous. You know anything about that? Or a stamp, a red mark like a dragon?"

"No. I mean, we've reported the recent drop in heroin overdoses, but I thought that was a shortage of supply caused by the--"

Karen's voice stops in her mouth with a click as Frank sits bolt upright, rigid as an angry dog, and snarling like one at someone behind her; praying to a god she has all but forgotten for strength and courage, she turns to face a bewilderingly harmless-looking man in a European suit a little the worse for wear (she assumes those stains can all be labeled "Frank was a stubborn son of a bitch here") and, of all things, a battered maroon trilby. It makes for a confusing message; all the guards are at attention, looking to this small, middle-aged, and eminently forgettable man for orders. He walks across the room toward them as though it were only of incidental interest to him that they are there, but when he speaks in an unexpectedly soft voice, a shiver runs down Karen's spine and settles in her belly. She is reminded of Westley, slick as oil under the persona he wore like glasses, like this man's checks and hat.

"So nice to see friends reunited, even in such circumstances as these." The little man is beaming at them with an air of avuncular pride. "Though I do apologize, Miss Page, for not introducing myself until now. I am Sarkov, these are my associates. And I have brought a present." With that, he sets a small vial on the floor. "Now, one person's treasure is, as they say, another's trash." His accented voice slips into a deeper register, and Karen can feel the tension singing through Frank's legs where she leans against them. "So either you take it, my dear, or you give it to your friend here. Or you could refuse it, of course, but that would be very impolite, and I might have to punish you, or your friend... again." Frank's growl grows audible, and a fresh spike of fear slicks her neck with sweat; she does not want to see this man angry, and she does not want to see any more of Frank's blood on anyone's clothes or the floor. His idea of "nothing too bad" is her "we need an ambulance," and she doesn't trust him to tell her in this exposed place if he's really hurt.

"Thank you," Karen hears herself say inanely, and before she can think too much about it, she shuffles forward toward the vial. Frank shouts and rocks in his chair and chains as hard and loud as possible, but Karen can't listen to him right now because he has been here for more than a day and has no one to look for him but her and maybe the housecoat hero he'd been working with a while ago; she has been here for only a few hours, and surely someone will notice if she vanishes and look for her (and find them both)--though the only two people in whose ability to find her she has real faith are either with her right now or dead--and she is more afraid of what this unknown shit might do to Frank's fragile sense of self and humanity than she is of telling all the nothing she knows to whoever will listen until they get tired of asking. So she grabs the vial, an absurdly small glass thing with a built-in needle under a sterile cap at one end and, looking to Sarkov for confirmation, stabs herself in the thigh with it. Frank wails behind her as the bottle drains; the little man smiles a small but pleased smile and inclines his head toward her in an old-world gesture of courtesy, and turns to leave, telling his men to alert him the moment anything changes. 

She scoots slowly back to her semicomfortable, warmish spot resting against Frank's knees, and can feel waves of rage rolling off him. She looks up at him and waits for him to look back. When he does, it's a little like the elevator: an entire conversation in half a minute of eye contact. She smiles at his miserable frown.

"It was my turn, Frank. Do you understand?"

Frank looks away, jaw working, and says nothing. She settles against him and wonders, with an irrepressible spark of curiosity, what will happen next. Foggy's voice echoes in her mind: "Life with superheroes, man. What. Even."


End file.
